The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student.

1999  Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard, " 'Resistance is Futile,' We Are Already Assimilated: Cyborging, Cyborg Societies, Cyborgs, and The Matrix"

2000  Sonja Fritzsche, "Out of the Western Box: Rethinking Popular Cultural Categories from the Perspective of East German Science Fiction"

2001  Eric Drown and Sha LaBare (tie), Drown for "Riding the Cosmic Express in the Age of Mass Production: Independent Inventors as Pulp Heroes in American SF, 1926–1939," and LaBare for "Outline for a Mode Manifesto: Science Fiction, Transhumanism, and Technoscience"

2002  Wendy Pearson, "Homotopia, or What's Behind a Prefix?"

2003  Sarah Canfield Fuller, "Speculating about Gendered Evolution: Bram Stoker's White Worm and the Horror of Sexual Selection"

2004  Melissa Colleen Stevenson, "Single Cyborg Seeking Same: The Post-Human and the Problem of Loneliness"

2005  Rebecca Janicker, "New England Narratives: Space and Place in the Narratives of H. P. Lovecraft"

2006  Linda Wight, "Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science and Science Fiction in Marge Piercy's Cyborgian Narrative"

2007  Joseph Brown, "Heinlein and the Cold War: Epistemology and Politics in The Puppet Masters and Double Star"

2009  David Higgins

2010  Andrew Ferguson

2011  Bradley Fest, "Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier"

2012 Florian Bast, "Fantastic Voices: Octavia Butler's First-Person Narrators and 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night'"

2013 W. Andrew Shephard, "Beyond the Wide World's End: Themes of Cosmopolitanism in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination"